Alone
by Deadalive15
Summary: Thirteen's thoughts after she gets her test results. Sorry I'm pretty bad with summaries. Wilson's Heart spoiler. Please review.


Author's note: This was my first fic, oneshot or otherwise.

Also, there are two lines, they're not word for word, but they're pretty close to two lines that were said in two different House episodes. Bonus points to anyone who can figure out which ones.

Disclaimer: I do not own the one character that is mentioned, nor do I use this fic for any financial gain.

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Alone

It would have been the same either way. That was what she had tried to tell herself. If it came back negative, no harm, no foul. If it came back positive she was always going to die either way. The only difference was now she would know.

She'd pictured this moment dozens of times in her head. She'd thought she'd been adequately prepared for it. She was wrong. She realized now she never could have prepared herself for anything like this.

It was suffocating, the disappointment she felt. She'd always known her chances weren't good, but she'd always had hope. There had always been a chance. That was all sucked away now. There was no such thing as hope anymore. Hope was meaningless to her. It didn't matter.

She'd never been timid. Fear hadn't been a huge factor in any of her major decisions, except when it came to this. And as much as she hated to admit it, this had made all the difference.

This had defined her. It had become her, eclipsed her real personality, and she had helped it, tried to hide behind secrets and nicknames. She could never forget who she really was. She was forced to remember every time someone called out to her, called her by name, or rather, lack of name.

No one knew her. No tried. No one even knew her name. They had never asked, so she had never told. Instead, she was who they had made her, who they had told her to be. To the world she was nameless. It would make no difference to them if she died.

She remembered something someone had once told her. You can't choose your birth, and you can't choose your death, but she couldn't help wondering, what if you could?

Against her wishes, her mind began to swim backwards to, not a happier time, a different time, a time that seemed like it was from a different life, someone else's.

She'd never had a real childhood. She'd been forced to grow up early, really early, before she could remember. She had never had friends either. She'd never been on the same level as anyone else her age. She had been through too much, and they hadn't been through enough.

The other thing she'd never had was a real family. She supposed she had had one at one point, long before she could remember. Everything she remembered about her mother had been in a hospital. Everything she remembered about her father she had tried to erase.

She'd raised herself, while others had had everything handed to them: money, grades, futures. She had worked for all that. She had worked hard. She had accomplished more than most of them, because, unlike them, she had had to try.

It didn't matter what she had accomplished though. She would never be able to enjoy it. She had no one to care about all the things she'd done. Her mother was gone, and her father hadn't cared about anything for a long time.

All those people she'd passed up, a lot of them worked on cars now, or roofs, or pipes, but they had families: parents, children, who were proud of them. No one had ever been proud of her, not that she could remember anyway.

She was alone. She had always been alone. At all her school assemblies she was alone. On all her birthdays she was alone. At her graduation, she was alone. No one cared. No ever had.

That was why she would have to go through this alone. This would be worse than doing a dance number in the school play and knowing no one was watching her, than not getting anything for her birthday, than being the only one who didn't have a cheering section at graduation. That had hardly mattered at the time, and it didn't matter at all now. This was the last thing she would experience. She would be depressed, she would be in pain, and she would be alone.

Before now, being alone had never bothered her. She'd been used to it. She hadn't known anything else. Growing up, the first person she saw walking into school in the morning was the first person she saw that day, and hopefully, the last person she saw leaving school would be the last person she saw that day. She came home to an empty apartment, and she always prayed that it would stay that way until she fell asleep. If not, it meant dealing with her father.

She'd done everything for herself, always. If the pantry was empty she went to the store alone. If she'd outgrown her clothes, she went to the store alone, even as a child. The only place she never went was the bank. She had a small amount of money, money she had earned herself, doing jobs for neighbors, and when she was old enough, at work. She didn't trust banks. If it was in a bank, her father could get to it. If it was behind a locked bedroom door in a shoe box tucked into a hole in the drywall behind a poster over her bed, it would be harder.

She brought herself back to the present. She had a long road ahead of her. She always had. The thought depressed her. The only difference, she pointed out to herself again, was that now she knew it.

She would have given nearly anything to go back a week, to when she treated the soap opera star, or two weeks, to when she treated the man who was too nice, so she could be blissfully ignorant one more time, so she could have that last shard of hope that she had lost. So she could believe once more, that she had what so many of her colleagues had, what she now realized was a luxury: time.

They would never know, she had decided, not that they would care if they did. She would quietly get worse and worse, sicker and sicker, until one day she would be too sick to come in, to do her job. They would never know what happened.

As someone had once told her, it wasn't the dying that got to people; it was the dying alone.


End file.
